𝐆 𝐎 𝐋 𝐃 𝐄 𝐍 .

“ -- the special ingredient, i say, is love -- anyone who says otherwise is attempting to slander me. wouldn’t be the first. “ 

he slides down upon the chaise lounge as if falling, lounging and nonchalant even in midair, with blonde hair tousled and cheeky rosy from the booze that has been ever gripped in his right hand since brunch that morning. in the other hand, he holds a tinfoil-wrapped brownie, held aloft like some sort of knight’s chalice; a challenge to any who might dare take it from him, and a show of braggadocios hubris at having provided in such a way for them all.  

and the special ingredient is very much not love. the slow dilating of his pupils claims otherwise. this is as close to a bacchanal as he might get tonight, here, on a velvet chaise: baked goods and tinfoil. but it certainly does the trick.

there’s such a tenderness to fate that has absolutely no importance, like a clothing rack barren aside from the single dress in your perfect size, or being seated at glance-length distance from a boy you find charming. so dom feels taken care of when she sits at the space assigned to her and notes familiarity all around – harry, hila, even birdie – despite the lack of sleep and perpetual feeling that someone is running a wet finger over the glass rim of her skull. 

dom does mean, in some capacity, to pay attention to the headmistress’s spiel – - but her dark cat-eye sunglasses are still on, and that makes it so easy to observe without being caught. then she catches the perfume on the inner of her wrist when she lifts her cup, and the scent distracts her with the useless wondering of who would be the next person to smell it, and what that circumstance might be. would anyone kiss her on the hand by way of greeting or introduction? she looks around behind the shield of her glasses and considers who it could be, like a murder-mystery game.

by the time the dean’s monologue has ended, she’s retained nothing at all, and has to turn to her partner across the table to request a recap. they seem either flustered or irritated by her lack of concentration, but she grins and removes her glasses, after which forgiveness makes its way to the forefront of his cheeks in a pink tone. the next round goes much the same, with a stranger attempting to maintain the intended format before dominique smashes it over her knee, veering off course to talk about her interaction with desmond tutu two summers ago.

in fact, the only time she seems to be evenly-paced and well-matched in the room is in the next moment, when she stands up, alone, and proceeds to walk towards a man that wants her there. in that performative way she’s so familiar with, dominique keeps her eyes to the ground at first, looking next at something that doesn’t exist on the opposite side of the room so that he might see her pale and slender neck. she makes eye contact before they sit, as if to acknowledge the position he’s taken for her, and she can’t help but think how darling it would be if he would kiss her hand.

“harry,” she admonishes, full-up of absolutely no conviction. he looks like he tastes like vanilla rum and ralph lauren polo and dominique does her best not to acknowledge it, despite liking the way he says I know. it makes her feel he truly might. “you haven’t even said hello yet.” she puts her elbow on the table and her chin atop her palm, a careful gesture similar to stacking teacup on saucer. “don’t be a bastard, say something nice to me first. go on,” her free hand pinches a sugar cube in the centre of the table, raises it to her mouth and bites down on a corner. “or i won’t say a word to you.”

she uncrosses her ankles to nudge the pointed toe of her stiletto under the leg of his trousers, lifting the hem as if preparing him for a rising flood. dom smiles while she plays under-the-table greetings in a way that doesn’t quite match a girl wearing her grandmother’s pearls. as if for the first time noticing it, dom looks at harry’s flask on the table to run her fingers over it, playing risqué little games by leaving it where others could see. “i feel sick,” her bottom lip pouts, playful in its slight exaggeration. it means i’m hungover and looks startling like can’t you do something about it? how terrible a little thing she is, switching as she did between being so unfathomably undeterred by everything around her and girlishly reliant on whatsoever stood opposite. her foot keeps rubbing against harry’s ankle offhandedly, and she goes back to sucking on the sugar cube as she eyes the glinting silver thing. “what is it, doll?”

she hopes the side of her shoe is cold on his ankle, and goes on playing this way – kittenish – until the fun is closed off by the sudden, deliberate push of his sock, so it crumples at the lip of his ferragamo. it’s a useless, briny little prank, but she’s pleased. her ankles return to proper form, crossed beneath her chair, and she pops the remainder of the cube straight onto her tongue. with renewed vigor she sits up, unclasping the flask and tilting it into her cup, as if she’d only been waiting for a sugar rush. “tell me you missed me terribly, and then i’ll tell you a story.”

he is incorrigible -- this is a fact. he is horribly arrogant, terribly presumptuous; harry rothschild-fitzgerald thinks far too much of himself, and far too little of the world that he inhabits. he is a bastard, and she says it to be true. and what she says to be true simply must be so. his finger circles absently about the rim of his teacup, gaze drifting down to the wet pink of her lips, which admonish him as they always do. arrogant enough to believe that he could place his own upon the slender angle of her neck -- he thinks of the way her collarbone dips beneath the thin fabric of her blouse, draws ocean waves upon the porcelain with his mind’s eye -- and yet wise enough to know the way the story ends. 

icarus burns, gatsby drowns, romeo drinks the poison; all tragic heroes die for their muses. but this is his hubris speaking, telling him that -- here, now, sitting across from such a muse -- he is both tragic and a hero, when in reality he is neither. 

“hello, darling,” he hums, speaking as if it has not been a near-whole summer since he has sat opposite her like this, “i would ask if you missed me, but i know well enough that you don’t miss anybody.” they miss you. as they should. “and you should know well enough --” he leans upon the table, mirroring her position, though he is not nearly as poised as she always manages to be, “-- that i am a bastard. but something tells me that you enjoy it.” if she did not, he knew, she would be as gone as a silk ribbon lost in a gust of winter wind. onto the next, then the next, then the next; he is incorrigible, but she is incomprehensible. 

he leans back once more as he feels the toe of her stiletto upon his ankle. harry’s lips twist lazily, gaze locked upon her visage in an outward refusal to look down. it’s all part of the game, to not look. what happens beneath the table stays beneath the table; it is all at once too intimate and too childish, and it is this dichotomy, this stark, sugary juxtaposition that makes the game so delicious. 

as her toe dips downward, he thinks of the film-camera photographs he took in florence, the seaside flowers he pressed between the faded pages of his journal, the poetry written with paper against a rock cliff face with a pencil snagged from a cafe table. her name exists in the margins; his muses play games with him, they are games. his breath catches in his throat, as her shoe is a harsh cold juxtaposed against the warmth of the muse-memory that the sight of her elicits ( for he thought of her often, often writing poetic letters and throwing them into the sea. it would be no fun to send them and be unable to watch her numerous expressions in reading them. ). 

“rum,” he answers, though his gaze refuses to drop to her fingers, to her chin in her hand, to her toe shuffling his sock deeper into his shoe; this is all in the game, and he would lose should he look away from the abyss-pools of her eyes, “it makes me feel as if i’m still on a beach somewhere; perhaps i’d be a pirate. i’d make a good pirate, wouldn’t i?” but of course, she is too petulant, too demanding, too deep in the fun of the game to answer just yet -- he must, as is usual, pay a toll first. 

at her prompting, he leans across the table, breaking his stoic stillness in the name of drawing closer. what was that she smelled of? it awoke in him a memory -- but which one he knew not. there were all too many. “tu m'as manqué,” he begins, “mi sei mancato. te he extrañado. mou éleipses. i’ve missed you terribly. tell me, dominique, however was i to carry on much longer without you?” by now, he has leaned fully across the table, so much so that he has stood from his chair without thinking, as if to take a too-deep whiff of her perfume. 

and then his eyes fall downward as she reaches again for his flask. there she is. 

He’s nearly drunk -- but he wears it well. As Brooklyn approaches, Harry glances at the clock; the dance from table to table is nearly over, and he -- tipsy, bored, fidgeting in his itching blazer and hard chair -- is more than ready to be free of the room and off to the fête that was promised him one short round ago. 

“A little birdie told me there’s an afterparty --” he says, before Brooklyn can even settle opposite him, “-- and just in time, too. I’ve emptied my flask in record time.” As if to prove it, he takes the unscrewed lid from his flask and tips it over; and not a drop falls from the empty lid. “My original plan was to get drunk on the roof, sun myself, and pretend I’m still on a beach surrounded by Italian women, but I’d never say no to a party.”

And neither would Brooklyn, he figures. They are kindred spirits; no one else quite understands the need to be drunk this early in the afternoon. They both reeked of arrogance, pretense, affluent deserving -- but also something else. Something conspiratorially sour. It was what had drawn the two to each other at the start, and it was what hung between them in every minute silence like a dark passenger, waiting to speak up between the syllables. 

          “ oh, honey, it’s funny you think that i don’t have a flask of my own. ” her voice is chiding but birdie winks towards harry, a little bolder than she is normally with him. she reaches a manicured hand into her bag and pulls out a little silver flask out. “ honeyed bourbon has been my vice of choice today. ” she raises an eyebrow. ” what’s been your poison ? ”

          maybe she’s had a little too much to drink already ( is this the fourth round or fifth ? she’s  no longer sure ) but who can blame her ? these sort of things were a drag. for as much as she does like most of her classmates, these organized functions were never her — for lack of a better term — they were never her cup of tea. she preferred her events bright and bold in a different fashion. they needed to be loud and unstoppable, unplanned and just slightly untamed.

         “ cheers, sugar, ” she says. she tips her cup towards him before taking a sip. birdie hums thoughtfully before saying, “ i’m not sure i’ll be in any state to go home after this, you know. the day is still so young. it’d be a waste to just call it a night. ” she glances around the room. “ i’m glad i planned an afterparty. it’d be a pity if i didn’t. ”

he lays a hand over his heart, ever theatrical. “a woman after my own heart,” he says, “rum is the spirit of choice today; reminds me of the beach. oh, to still be on a beach.” it has been less than twenty-four hours since he returned from the ocean, from a far-away beach on which he spent most of his time drunk, naked, and blurry. his blazer is stifling -- but he can still feel the sand between his toes. 

in tandem, they sip upon their altered teas; harry grins, wrinkling his nose as he feels the burn slip over the tongue and down into his stomach, which sits empty save for the rum and tea. despite his proclivity for posture and bluster, he listens to birdie as she speaks, for he has missed the entertaining company, the familiar game. his favorite form of southern comfort -- the burn of booze hardly compares. 

of course, he was sure she would relish the opportunity to dump his tea over his sun-bleached hair. he might laugh at it, too. 

Somewhere, there’s a candle burning. A light left on. A reminder. 

It isn’t to say that he didn’t enjoy the company of his prior two conversation partners; on the contrary, they were excellent partners with which to engage in a warming tete-a-tete while he steeled himself with the libations he had been so generous -- generous to himself -- to bring along for the occasion. It was no function without something to help it along; and there was no Harry without the smell of liquor on his lips, cologne in his hair, and the memory of some long-off beach upon his sun-dappled skin. 

There was also no green light without a woman to light it for; and as she approached it, the light, the candle, throbbed -- or perhaps it was the debaucherous passenger who lived at the pit of his stomach. Gatsby’d had it, and so did Harry. Only, it seemed, he would drown in a teacup, and not a swimming pool.

But not before she would arrive to breathe life back in.

He stands as she approaches the table; this is not protocol, and the scrape of the chair upon the stone floor earns him another stern glare from the proctor, though he cares not. As she approaches, he rests his fingertips upon the rumpled tablecloth, pressing down into the hard surface of the table -- as it is impossible not to drink her like something cool on a hot day, like something mint and juniper, something both uncanny and familiar. He is a man at the end of a dock, hanging down with his head dunked in water that he can never drink. And she is there to pull him up. 

But she also pushes him down again. Inhale, exhale. Oh, to drown. 

He waits to sit until she does; the decorum is something that will always mark their strange and uncanny partnership, and he would not trade it for anything. Though it hasn’t been very long at all, he takes her in, re-memorizes. As if he’s forgotten. Another scrape rings out as he sits, settling into the halfhearted luxury that comes of one attempting to find comfort in a dining hall chair. 

“I’ll tell you my stories if you tell me yours,” he challenges, reaching into his breast pocket and producing his flask, which is now only half-full, “We can play ‘two truths and a lie’. I know how you enjoy that game”. Sliding it across the table to sit between them, and shifting his teacup so that it blocks prying eyes, Harry makes a great show of pushing his sun-bleached hair from his eyes, thinking at once of Ibiza, of Monaco, of Belize. He does hope she asks -- he does love to brag. 

By now, it is no secret that Harry has indulged more than perhaps is socially acceptable for an afternoon of simple tea and conversation. The flask he wears within the breast pocket of his jacket now inhabits the table between them as Birdie approaches, out and unashamed — and equally unafraid of the watchful eyes of the proctor who already shushed him once already this hour. He has been looking forward to this interaction, for Birdie is a certain fascination; and coming off the high of his all too brief chat with Dom has left him far more drunk than the rum in his flask can provide. Birdie serves, then, now, as he beholds her with all the unashamed boldness that his gaze can possibly hold, as a sweet candy atop a sugary cocktail — the spiced-candy rim atop a toddy that warms him from within and without.

It is also all too obvious that his love for this game hits in a much different sweet spot than it does with dear Birdie. But she is all too fun all the same.

“Share in a libation?” he offers, brandishing his flask; it has been a summer since he has spoken to Birdie, but he talks as if it isn’t so. “I’ve been waiting for you to arrive at my table. How’s my favorite peach?” Or whatever the Alabama equivalent might be -- he does not care enough to quantify it. 

Send “✉” for a text that WASN’T SENT. 

[ unsent text ➙ hila ]: Do you remember when we were younger and it wasn’t so hard? Wish we could go back to that, sometimes. I still have the first play I wrote. Remember that? Five pages. You were the star. You were the only character, actually. It was fitting. You laughed at it then, and you’d laugh at it now, I’m sure.[ text ➙ hila ]: come drink, darling. i’m feeling sentimental. 

Send “ø” for a LATE NIGHT text.

[ text ➙ hila ]: If I told you that I was planning to come to you across the rooftops, would you leave your window open for me?

Send “#” for a RANDOM text.

Send “⁇” for a DRUNK text.

[ text ➙ birdie ]: TWEET TWEET BIRDIE [ text ➙ birdie ]: come over and call me sugar and hold me, i need southern comfort[ text ➙ birdie ]: i need you to hold me gently like paula deen holds butter[ text ➙ birdie ]: yeeeeeeeehaw

Send “$” for an ACCIDENTAL text.

Send “✆” for a MORNING text. 

[ text ➙ dom ]: either this is your silk stocking on my kitchen counter, or i’ve begun sleepwalking in style. either would be reasonable options, but i have a hard time believing i’d only wear one silk stocking at a time.

Send “✉” for a text that WASN’T SENT. 

[ unsent text ➙ dom ]: [IMAGE REDACTED][ text ➙ dom ]: please tell me i cancelled that last message in time.

Send “☎” for a RUSHED text. 

[ text ➙ dom ]: i’m on the mayor’s boat, come quick[ text ➙ dom ]: let me clarify. mayor isn’t here. quickly.

Send “⁇” for a DRUNK text.

[ text ➙ dom ]: i am gonna call you DAISY fromm now on and ther is nothing you can do to stop me. i wanna drown in the pool of your EYES baby

Send “✿” for a SUGGESTIVE text. 

[ text ➙ dom ]: Just so that we aren’t under any illusions, I leave the light on as an invitation. It may not be a green light on a far-away dock, but the sentiment stands. And by that, I mean that you’d have to do very little work at all. A woman like you should never have to. And I am a very hard worker.

Send “ø” for a LATE NIGHT text.

[ text ➙ dom ]: Do you think it’s too plebeian to be considering drinking Fireball? Who am I? Put me out of my misery.

Send “✘” for a HATEFUL text.

[ text ➙ dom ]: No, I will not take a line with you in the bathroom, of all places. Do I look like a Kardashian?

Send “#” for a RANDOM text.

[ text ➙ dom ]: I want another tattoo on my ass. Perhaps the Dean’s face. He’s so ugly. 

Send “@” for a SCARED text.

[ unsent text ➙ dom ]: I feel my father may truly do it this time. The last time I was here, I saw him standing in the corner of his study, looking down upon a picture of my mother and myself, clutching a glass decanter as if he wished to smash it over the photo frame. His knuckles were white; when I called out to him, he turned and raised it, completely wild-eyed. I couldn’t decide if I’d frightened him, if he was drunk, or if for a moment he really thought that he could be rid of his greatest failure. Or perhaps I was drunk. It was likely all of the above. Ah - I don’t know why I’m telling you this. Perhaps I’d like for you to write a screenplay about my untimely murder when [ text ➙ dom ]: Oh, fuck. I lost my tie clip. It was a gift from my father. I think he really may kill me for this one.

Send “&” for a LOVING text.

[ text ➙ dom ]: Never was there a woman more worth drowning for. Daisy is nothing. You, my dear, are everything.

Send “%” for a CURIOUS text.

[ text ➙ dom ]: Is that lace I see? Give me a little peek - I’m just across the courtyard.

Send “ツ” for an EXCITED text.

[ text ➙ dom ]: The red convertible by the curb outside your window -- tell me who you see in the driver’s seat. [ text ➙ dom ]: I can SEE your silhouette through the glass, you need to COME LOOK[ text ➙ dom ]: It’s ME! Your old Harry. Finally in a convertible. Would you judge me if I cried? Would you judge me if I CONTINUED TO TYPE IN ALL CAPS? [ text ➙ dom ]: If you’re not down here with that little beret of yours in thirty seconds, I am breaking into song WITHOUT YOU

Send “$” for an ACCIDENTAL text.

[ text ➙ dom ]: this is the fifth goddamn sex dream i’ve had about her in a week. i think i may throw myself off the veranda. [ text ➙ dom ]: and by her, my dear bunny, i mean helen mirren. you understand.

Send “♀” for a HEARTBREAKING text. 

full name: henry “harry” ambrose rothschild-fitzgerald

age: twenty-two

sexuality: bisexual (closeted)

gender: cis-male & he/him

major & minor: english major & classics minor 

a pop is punctuated by vapor rising from the lip of a glass bottle. he twists an heirloom around his finger as letter grades are boosted with one bat of an eyelash. he shifts in an uncomfortable blazer, an uncomfortable silence. he’s just on the precipice, dangling with no fear of the consequence.

                                      more info + connections + plots below the cut !!